I thought about putting together a community pool, like our dear friend FRQ, but it’s a very slow news day and I have a couple of things I need to get done at work. So how about we all get in the spooky mood and tell ghost stories.

Real or not, I want to be so creeped out that I’m looking behind my shoulder for the rest of the afternoon. “Was that a ghost?? No, just a box of envelopes!”–afternoon Flanny.

(I’ll add mine in the comments once I’m done looking at this spreadsheet.)

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About flanny

Flanny was born and raised in a Detroit suburb, but tells people she's from Detroit without clarification because it makes her sound tough. She is not tough. Her favorite member of One Direction is Louis Tomlinson, and her favorite Agatha Christie detectives are Tommy and Tuppence.

32 Responses to Monster Community Ghoul 10/29/15

On this very night, ten years ago, along this same stretch of road in a dense fog just like this. I saw the worst accident I ever seen. There was this sound, like a garbage truck dropped off the Empire State Building. And when they finally pulled the driver’s body from the twisted, burning wreck, it looked like THIS!

Once upon a time, there was a couple who were very much in love. A beautiful pair, and the envy of all who knew them. One terrible day, he was killed in a mugging gone wrong. At first he was confused, his restless spirit left to wander the earth pining after his lost love. Eventually, however, through the help of a medium, he was able to make contact (and maybe love?) (ambiguous) with his wife. They discovered that the mugging was actually a hit, carried out by his jealous business partner, a morally corrupt man who had been lusting after his company shares and also his beautiful wife. I forget how it ends, tbh.

I have not met any ghosts (NOT FOR WANT OF TRYING, CLEARLY), but when I was about 15 or so my friend’s cousin bought a ~150 year old house down the street from her and began to renovate it. I was at her house one day when her cousin called and said we should come see what he found. They took down some wallpaper and found a hidden door leading to a small room under the stairs. The room was also covered in wallpaper, and when they took the wallpaper down, the bare brick walls were covered with kids’ drawings of monsters and ghosts. One of the walls a map of the house, and in that room there was a coffin and a ghost and the word “baby.” There was also a little cement square poured into the corner of the room with a pair of very small boots stuck in it.

They just chipped up the cement and painted the walls and turned it into a closet.

One time when I was in high school my older sister was housesitting for some family friends while they were on vacation. I went over there to hang out constantly during this time because they were rich and had a DVD player which at the time was the height of luxury. We had a slumber party on one of the last nights and were having a grand old time until something sPoOoOoKy happened. The phone rang and rang until the machine picked it up, and suddenly some strange and scary sounds started coming from the answering machine. We were pretty sure it was a ghost or a murderer, but it turned out it was just my sister’s friend Jorge and he was drunk.

I have a very low creeped-out threshold so most of my spooky stories are, like, “I once walked past a sort-of ramshackle building,” or “I saw a picture of a cemetery in a book,” or “My roommate stared out the window behind me for a couple of second before responding to my question.”
But as you all know the building I work in is totes haunted, because allegedly this is the land that used to be the town cemetery. But in the 30s when they built this building, they moved the cemetery BUT THEY MISSED SOME OF THE BODIES. So that’s where’s the ghosts come from. It’s like, come on ghosts, the cemetery is, like, one hundred feet away. Just waft over there. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been down here after dark a lot (not alone) and sometimes the phone will hang up on people or the computer monitors will go all fuzzy. It’s the ghosts!

SPEAKING OF CEMETERIES, I have a friend who lived across the street from the oldest cemetery in Canada, right here in Halifax, during Hurricane Juan. The cemetery has these big old trees, and the trees were uprooted in the storm. As you can imagine, the roots spread out all over the cemetery, and so when they were ripped out of the ground they disinterred a bunch of bodies! She sent me photos from her window, the whole street was closed off with guys is Hazmat suits collecting bones and old bits of people, trying to figure out what went where.

I like to imagine that some pieces of people were mixed up, and now those ghosts haunt the same gravesite. Some of them found romance, companionship, or a deathlong friendship, but there are a few that are just Odd Couple-style sniping at each other all the time. I’d watch that sitcom.

Or maybe you’ll doze off in front of your computer and wake up to see a giant paintbrush hovering over you and you’ll hear a soft, soothing voice say, “And now we have a happy little tree,” and you’ll try to shake your head but it won’t move and try to scream but trees don’t have mouths and why would you want to scream anyway, you’re a happy little tree, a happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy

I’ve already told my UFO story, which wasn’t even scary, and I don’t really have any other ones. But is everyone listening to the Lore podcast, which is all about creepy stories? And if you sign up for their email list, they send you a full transcript (and nothing else; I haven’t gotten any annoying emails from them) which is nice when I’m in the mood to read instead of listen: http://www.lorepodcast.com

Since you reccomended them to me Flans, I have been listening to the Bowery Boys podcasts, and they just teased a ghost edition on their FB page about a REDHEADED ghost! As a redhead…you know this is right up my alley. It’s a HOMELESS MONSTERS MONTH OF SCARES MIRACLE! (Haunting? Miracle?)

Everyone seems to be joking around in this thread, which is fine — but remember, ghosts are the sorrow-driven revenge monsters of lost eternity. They’re no laughing matter. And that’s why I’m going to tell you this story.

One summer during college, I got a job in a factory. The place was a big deal back in the 1890s, but then sat vacant almost 50 years until the start of that summer — so I was the only kid who auditioned for a job there. There were a hundred employees, but everyone else was a grizzled old-timer, who I assumed transferred in from some other factory.

I both hated it and liked it. They didn’t have much for me to do, which was great. The machines hummed and chugged around me and I just swept up dust. All day, every day. There wasn’t more I could do, as I was specifically ordered to never touch the machines. “Very dangerous,” said Old Pappy, who wore an eyepatch. He had a bad Scottish accent too, if that helps with color. “Peepil who dahnow wha’ thay’re doon… get kailled.” So I just swept. It was always dusty. Idly, one day I remarked to the manager, Big Tom Gaston, that it was passing strange so big and sturdy a facility would have gone unused those 50 years — why, almost to the day, that coming Thurs! He gave me only a peculiar look and drifted away.

I noticed on my first lunchbreak that I was the only person to bring lunch. I wanted to fit in, so after that I decided to eat entirely out of the vending machine in the breakroom, because I saw Old Pap always walking around with a snack from it — but I couldn’t get it to work. It just took my coins and was a total piece of shit. On closer inspection, there were actual cobwebs in it. The fuck? (Although at least the stuff in there only cost a nickel.) So I asked my coworkers where they ate, and they wouldn’t tell me. They’d only moan that they were hungry. Sooooo hungry. Or they’d make casual sexist and racist remarks nooo problem like it was 50 years ago. I suggested maybe they could chill on that score, and this one skinny toughguy called Gillooly fixed me with a severe stare: “You clean up the grease spot on the main floor if you want anything from us, kid.”

Well, I tried, a little, because I almost wanted to impress these guys, but that grease spot was baked the hell in. You might as well try to scrub the white off a toilet or the stink out of a cheese. I formed a plan to come in over the weekend and handle it — I’d have some free time that Saturday, around midnight. But until then, I’d just keep sweeping the usual dust.

And so it happened that Thursday afternoon, as I was getting into some real good dust, the hum of cogs and pistons and the roar of the furnace barely covered up a hideous human scream.

I didn’t want to appear too excitable in front of my laconic asshole coworkers, so I put the broom down and wandered lazily to the main floor — but as I went, I heard another scream… and another… and another… so by the I got there, I was freaked right out for real. And what do you think I saw?

That’s right. And it didn’t take long to piece together, either. Old Pappy had purchased a snack from the vending machine, but due to his lack of depth perception had dropped it into the machinery while trying to eat it. When he reached for it, his bum eye again betrayed him, and a scarf given him by his dead fiancee caught in the gears. His was the first scream, as the machinery towed him to his doom.

The second scream was Big Tom Gaston’s. He’d run to help and slipped on the grease. Into the gears he went, feet first. The third scream came from Gillooly, as he attempted to free Gaston and also slipped on that grease. And so I stood there and watched as every single employee of the factory ran to help, slipped on the grease, and plunged into the machinery. With a scream and an explosion of blood, they each died. In less than 45 minutes, it was all over. I knew I would never get over what I had witnessed.

That night, I was on a date, and she wanted to make out. “I know just the place,” I said, thinking I’d drive us up to the factory parking lot. It had a great view and I knew we could be alone.

“Ew,” she said, “That old abandoned building?”

“It’s not abandoned,” I explained. “I work there!”

“No,” my date replied. I should add that she was incredibly hot. “It got shut down after a terrible accident back in ’49. Every employee was killed, one by one.” At that moment we pulled into the parking lot — and where the factory had been, under the eerie moonlight, I saw only an old crater. “See?” she said. “They finally demolished it back at the beginning of this summer.”

THE END… OR IS IT??

It’s not. Because, my fellow monsters, what did that factory produce, you’ve no doubt been wondering? Envelopes. Standard. Business. Envelopes. Also manilas and the security kind. And they say that the last batch — the batch feeding through the folders and the gluers as everyone died — went out to stores on schedule, and that today, if you’re alone in a basement that still has a box of those envelopes on a shelf… you can hear the ghosts of the assholes of Acme Mega Seal-Tite Mail Supply moan about their fate.

One time I was at the birthday dinner of a really close friend who has a ton of friends I don’t know so I got stuck at the end of the table with some strangers. They were telling me about working at Cal State Channel Islands, which was built on the site of a former mental hospital, and they had all these stories about spooky occurrences and haunted cafeterias and stuff (see http://creepyla.com/2011/09/16/haunted-cal-state-channel-islands/ for details).

Then my friend came over to say hi and I told her they were telling me ghost stories about the campus and they totally denied it! They acted as if I made the whole thing up! I think maybe they were possessed when they were talking to me about the ghost stuff or something. It was so weird and now I avoid them at my friend’s various parties.

I KNOW I’ve talked about this before, but there was a fancy old mental hospital when I was growing up right across the street from the mall. When I was in college or maybe the end of high school, they tore it down and put up McMansions. The subdivision still feels so weird and creepy and oddly soulless. Here’s a pic of the hospital, though!

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